Tuesday June 2nd 2009 Phnom Penh

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Tuesday June 2nd 2009 Phnom Penh
Had breakfast in our hotel which wasn’t too bad and was decent value. We decided to check out of hotel and head down to the area we were the previous night. It was only about 5 minutes by tuk tuk. On the way we headed to the Vietnamese embassy and dropped our passports off for our visas along with $35 each. It’s a bit weird the currencies over here, everything is priced in Real and in US dollars. You receive your change in dollars with what should be your coins coming in local currency notes. It works ok once you get used to it and the Euro is at $1.42 at the moment so we are doing well, even if it is pretty expensive on the tourist trail here. It’s about $4 for dinners. We checked in to a service apartment for $15 same as we were paying in the last place but this room was brilliant. It even had a kitchen so we headed off to a local supermarket that served western imports for crazy prices and bought a few things for breakfast and to make sandwiches. It was brilliant to have room to make a simple sandwich for lunch.

After our ham and cheese sandwiches we walked about 15 minutes up tot royal palace. Its actually not a bad looking city, for once in an Asian city there is a sense of open space, they have a few boulavards around the palace and government buildings that are super wide and have massive green parks and fountains and monuments up the medians. It was actually a nice walk. After waiting for the palace to open after its 2.5 hour lunch we entered and strolled around it ceremonial grounds. The grounds were pristine lawns with ornate temples oriental buildings scattered and exploring them was pretty relaxing. The kind of locations are often such oasis’ in busy Asian cities, maybe not all the time but now in the low season its pretty often you have entire areas of very popular tourist spots to yourself, its fantastic. There were a good few notable sights in the palace, the silver Pagoda was fairly impressive but the main sight was the throne room, you were kept a fair distance from the throne itself but the room and intricate decorations were fantastic.

We left the palace and wander up along the riverbank to an area where our book had pointed out a few bars and guesthouses. The area wasn’t actually all that great, very similar to any of the other traveler hotspots and seemed pretty dirty and seedy with everyone trying to sell you something so we were well happy with our new guesthouse.

Our visas were ready to be picked up in the Vietnamese embassy by now so we got a tuk tuk and headed off. It was way easier and cheaper to organize them here, all in one day and $35 dollars versus almost a month and a fair bit more cash at home. We ate again in a local restaurant in our new area and used the free wifi to look up our next destination which we were off to in the morning Siem Reap.

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